A gorgeous mermaid costume hangs on my closet door. When I rearranged my closet last week, I found it and hung it up where I could see it because it makes me smile.

A friend bought it for me at an after Halloween clearance sale. I had mentioned wanting a mermaid outfit that wasn’t trashy. And she found one. It’s mostly a brilliant blue, with a flared gold metallic tail and a beige loose weave net type thing around the waist, in which are caught a few stray pearls for, you know, realism.

Seth-7yr was the first to ask about it. It was early one morning, before school. “WHY…. do you have a mermaid suit?”

I looked at him for a long, long time, and then confided in a whisper that I was sometimes a Secret Mermaid.

He looked back at me for a long time. Then he said, “Where do you GO in that? Anyway. You left the tags on.”

“True. I did. I go to Secret Mermaid places.”

“Are you, um, really?”

“OF COURSE. Now go get ready for school.”

He came back later and hugged me and whispered that he was going to tell ALL his friends that I was actually a Secret Mermaid.

I told him that of course he could do that, but he probably needed to consider how they would take the news. They might get jealous. Probably none of their moms are Secret Mermaids. It’s REALLY rare. Especially in West Texas. People here get all excited when they see a little bit of rain. Mermaids are practically unheard.

I don’t know what got into me. I’ve never perpetuated the Santa thing. The easter bunny thing. The tooth fairy thing. (Well. there was big tooth fairy drama last week, but let’s not even go there. UGH. She has it WAY harder than secret mermaids. There are actually tooth fairy rules and precedents and protocol she’d obligated to remember and follow OH THE STRESS.)

I don’t know why at that moment I went with the Secret Mermaid story with Seth-7yr. Maybe it’s just been such a rough couple of years of hard truths… and a little bit of fantasy seemed okay at the time. It was a ‘hey, you and I are in this strange and unique moment together… this shared suspension of disbelief. Let’s enjoy it for a minute before someone has a meltdown over a divorce issue.”